The advent of digital imaging technology has altered the behaviour of the film industry, in the sense that more and more movies or professional videos are shot digitally during their production. Digital cinematography, the process of capturing video content as digital content items, has become increasingly prevalent for film production. The main advantage of digital cinematography is that it can store, transmit, and retrieve a large amount of information with high fidelity relevant to the originally recorded data. Information stored in digital formats provides for convenient processing and manipulation by digital operations such as transcoding, transferring, duplication, image processing, converting, and colour grading operations.
During digital cinematography, video content is stored as media content items in digital format. Quite often the media content items are encoded by compression algorithms such as MPEG-2 and H.264 to keep the item size down to thereby reduce storage and communication requirements. Also, increasingly, media content items are stored as raw image files or digital negatives containing minimally processed data received from the image sensor. However the formats of the compressed media content items or raw content items are not suitable for editing. Accordingly it is necessary to convert those formats into appropriate file formats for editing, such as Apple™ ProRes® and Avid™ DNxHD®. Such processing is regarded as transcoding, in which media content items encoded in one format are converted into other digital formats suitable for post-production.
Given the computationally intensive nature of compression and the growing volume of digital video content during a movie or professional video production, the transcoding process can take as long as the actual shooting time itself. Post production usually starts after all the media content items for a movie or professional video have been batched transcoded. This delay is due to the dependencies between the media content items and the fact that they are often shot in an order different from intended storyline.